


Odegra

by PeniG



Series: Akashic Records [18]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Colorblind Crowley (Good Omens), Computers, Ducks, Odegra, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-14
Updated: 2019-11-14
Packaged: 2021-01-30 19:16:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,001
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21433339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PeniG/pseuds/PeniG
Summary: Crowley said turning the M25 into the Dread Sign Odegra took three computer hacks. He never said who the hacker was.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Series: Akashic Records [18]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1446628
Comments: 32
Kudos: 298





	Odegra

**Author's Note:**

> Crowley's presentation on the M25 is made in the 70s. I was in high school in the 70s. Computer programs were flowcharted, drafted by hand, and often translated into bundles of punched cards with rubber bands around them. Memory and RAM were measured in kilobytes and computers were room-sized mainframes that used magnetic tape. Monitors usually displayed green characters on a black background, when the characters weren't gold, or sometimes multiple colors on the same screen. 
> 
> My colorblind Crowley, riding the wave of life constantly adapting to shifting conditions, couldn't possibly hack a 70s computer. He just couldn't. Aziraphale, on the other hand? A natural. There's a reason why, in the book, Aziraphale has an early-model PC on which he does meticulous taxes and Crowley has the latest-greatest computer still in the packaging. Crowley is an app-user. Aziraphale is a programmer, if he's sufficiently motivated.
> 
> Aziraphale and Alan Turing would have gotten along beautifully. I can't view Turing's death as anything but indirect murder by an ungrateful government and therefore my Aziraphale will never be over it, either.

“Must you be so melodramatic?” Aziraphale asked, knowing the answer. He’d been binge-reading Tolkien for a few days and lost track of the season, so he hadn’t worn a warm enough coat for the autumn weather, or brought enough (miraculously adapted for ducks) bread for the increase in waterfowl during migration, and wasn’t in the mood to linger out here. “Tell me what the matter is and we’ll sort out how to fix it.”

Crowley hurled pumpernickel viciously at the black swan, who caught it with lofty aplomb. “You don’t _want_ to help me fix this. It’s the evillest thing I’ve engineered in over a century, a real breakthrough, except I won’t be able to deliver and Dagon’ll have my hide - literally - for failing. Which is why I didn’t want to get bogged down in submission procedures. If nobody knew I’d started, it wouldn’t matter that I can’t finish.”

A huge raft of strange ducks drew circles on the smooth surface of the pond, while familiar ones crowded and jostled the shoreline. Aziraphale tossed out a stale garabaldi biscuit and watched the subsequent battle. “Wasn’t it partly your loud complaints about the demons who nearly caused an atomic bomb accident that led to the policy change?”

“No. Maybe. _No!_ It was a coincidence of timing, that’s all. I wasn’t the only one complaining about the bombs. If they’d done it as a coordinated thing and we’d been ready for the mass draw-off of adversaries to deal with it, our side would’ve had a field day. Anybody could see that. But there’s loads of difference between saying ‘maybe we should communicate better about stupid ops with wide-ranging consequences’ and getting saddled with a damn _planning_ committee! _That_ was Dagon, all the way.” Crowley’s long fingers wrestled a dark and chewy crust, with a restlessness Aziraphale knew all too well. When Hellish politics started closing in on the Serpent of Eden, it showed in the movements of his hands, the extra edge of drama in his grumbles and his plans. He’d relaxed for a time after Aziraphale’d brought him the holy water a few years ago, the implied promise that someday, somehow, they would put themselves on a more intimate footing again mellowing his anxiety; but apparently whatever external factors had led to his ramped-up desire for heavy ordnance had not improved since then.  
  
“Just_ tell_ me what the project _is_.” Aziraphale pitched a heel of rye to the seediest looking duck in the ranks before him, who caught and bolted it as her fellows descended upon her. “You can’t imagine you can shock me after all this time.”

Crowley gave up on tearing the bread and threw it into the middle of a gaggle of geese. “All right, but you won’t like it. You know that big traffic plan, the giant roundabout thingy -“

“The ring road around London?” All right,_ that_ was a surprise. Neither of them had ever performed any major urban infrastructure manipulations - that was the edge of the slippery slope neither wanted to set foot on, of dictating to the humans instead of influencing them in the use of their free will.

“That’s the one. I’m naturally interested in traffic - can’t drive properly in a gridlock - so I got a look at the plan, and it was _so close_ \- here - “ He made a circular gesture with the next bread bit before lobbing it. “You see how the ducks swim?”

“Roughly in a circle, yes.”

“Shift it in your head, what it’d look like from above, eh?” He gestured again. “You see that?”

Aziraphale sighed and performed the mental twist, comparing what his eyes saw with what his mind could conceive, and studied the result. “Is that -? No. Not quite. But if you extended that string of ducks -“

“And adjusted the westmost geese like so -“ Crowley’s hands flicked and the geese obeyed.

“And flattened the northeastern -“ Aziraphale, feeling sick, hurled an entire slab of garibaldi into the middle of the raft of waterfowl forming the dread sign Odegra, breaking it up as the weary migrants converged upon it. “But -_ my dear_ \- all those automobiles, going round and round it every day -“

“Every night, too. Like water on a prayer wheel. Constantly. For decades to come, maybe centuries if they build it well enough.”

Aziraphale could see why Crowley hadn’t wanted to tell him. The thing would pollute London’s honest smog with a faint but constant mist of low-grade evil, infecting the atmosphere of every living, breathing being in the city, whether they drove or not. And the drivers would be participating in that, without being aware of it and, therefore, without their own consent. At least - “The widdershins traffic, yes, but what about the sunwise traffic? That should undo it - shouldn’t it?”

“Not with it attaching to the chthonic leys the way I planned. It’d set up an obstruction vibe, sure, but that’ll bleed off into traffic jams -“

“And the consequent frustration and Wrath will easily offset - yes, I see.” Aziraphale blinked at him, nearly overwhelmed by a mixture of consternation and vicarious pride: _That’s **my** demon! Nobody else’s adversary could even conceive of doing such a thing!_ “All right, that’s terrifyingly wily, and would be difficult to impossible for most of your colleagues to pull off. But you’ve done that sort of thing before. Alpha Centauri.”

“Yeah, but I was on the build team for that. Still, I_ should’ve_ been able to wing it. I’ve been cozying up to draftsmen, city planners, contractors - got all the connections anybody could want. Not exactly a doddle, but when I submitted the proposal I figured - should be _doable_.”

“Doable and diabolical. So what’s the problem?”

Crowley grimaced and hurled more bread at random. “Computers.”

“What about them?”

“There’s a couple of points that - There’s plenty of hands involved here to generate a cock-up to cover me, but there’s also lots of eyes on the thing, and I can only influence them so much, even infiltrating the work space. I figure, a lot of the work’s being done on computers, so in order to slip those bits past them, that’s where I need to bury it. Don’t talk them into it, give it to them as something that’s already been decided - like I did with Alpha Centauri. And I just - _I can’t_.”

“What, can’t use the computers? But you love new technology. You’re always up on the latest greatest gadget.”

“I know, but - these things - have you ever seen one?”

“A few.” Aziraphale’s heart twisted, thinking of poor Alan. (He would _never_ get over what happened to Alan Turing.)

“Then you know they aren’t exactly convenient to bring home and play with in the flat. The one I need to fiddle with takes up a whole room bigger than your shop, and the work stations aren’t exactly cozy. You use a keyboard to punch holes in a card, and it’s this whole language you have to learn to tell the machine what to do, and the worst bit - the absolute _worst_ bit - is, you can only see what you’re doing in colored light characters on a black screen.”

“Oh! Oh, I see, yes, that must be a strain on your eyes. Can’t you adjust the display?”

“Maybe? Nothing I’ve tried so far works, and it gives me the kind of headache that comes back as fast as I cure it, and the instructions you give the machine - they don’t make any _sense_ and they’re _finicky,_ and then you bundle up the punch cards and put them in the queue - because the machine’s running all the time, and everybody has programs to run, some of them in big batches in a particular order or they won’t work, got to wait your turn - and if you’ve made one tiny mistake the whole thing fails and you find out about it the next day, but you have to analyze any output you got, _if_ you got any, to find where the mistake was, and if you drop the bundle of cards, forget it, you’ll never get it back in order, and - and I just - _I can’t do it_ -“ Crowley spiked a stale bun so hard it bounced, whacking a juvenile Muscovy duck in the chin and knocking it backwards.

Aziraphale tried to remember ever hearing Crowley admit he couldn’t do something, and had a vivid flashback to him clinging to a mountain in the Flood as the children he’d tried to keep afloat drowned around him. This was nearly the opposite of that, and he_ ought_ to feel satisfaction at Crowley’s thwarting himself, so to speak. “So, what’s the penalty for failure to complete a filed plan?”

Crowley shrugged, the breeze off the pond fluttering his fashionably long hair into his eyes. He’d recently added a mustache, and Aziraphale wasn’t sure how he felt about it. “Dagon’s Master of Torments as well as Lord of the Files. Depends on how boring the reports are, how disappointed she is, and whether she feels like getting her hands dirty or delegates.”

Dagon remained the only major demon Aziraphale had ever had any dealings with. The sheer cheerfulness of her malice was far more unsettling than the broken pain and bitterness of the possessing demons he’d exorcised back in the day, or the nervous connivings of the little tempters he occasionally had to banish. “How long do you have?”

“Technically? Ten years or so. I’m sure I can stall consequences till the thing opens. But practically? If I don’t get the changes into the plans in the next six months, it’ll all fall to pieces, whatever I do.”

Aziraphale crumbled a fistful of rye and scattered it as he heard himself say: “Well. Perhaps all you need is a fresh set of eyes.”

“I’m _not_ asking for help. Not from _you,_ not for _this._”

“I’m not _offering_ help. I just - I’m curious. Send me the specifications. Perhaps there’s a way for me to, to claim it as a win for our side, thwarting your diabolically clever plan.”

That won him an amused sneer, anyway. “Won’t work. No way your boss will understand the thing.”

“I’ll be the judge of that. Send the files over. If you’re giving up, you won’t need them anyway.” Aziraphale shivered and dusted crumbs off his hands as Crowley made a vaguely assenting noise. It would be a good day to share a shepherd’s pie and a pint, in a place he knew which he was certain Crowley would like - except that walking there together would obviate the entire point of pretending to be random strangers chatting idly as they fed the ducks. He was in the middle of some back-and-forth with head office concerning his involvement in the movement for queer rights, and Crowley was in no position to push the rules with his own head office at the moment. Which wouldn’t stop him from doing so, were Aziraphale to invite him. “I’d better be toddling along. Next month at the British Museum, then?”

“If you like,” said Crowley. “That swan’s looking at me funny.”

“I’m sure it will regret that. Toodle-oo.” He did not wait to hear Crowley’s response, or to observe the inevitable escalation of the swan issue.

Which was not satisfactory, but there they were.

\---  
The plans and specifications for the Odegra Project arrived in a large box, return address Snaker & Taylor, alongside and nearly identical to ordinary book packages. Aziraphale brewed himself a pot of tea strong enough for a mouse to trot across while he added the new books to his ledgers and filed the invoices, then cleared his desk and settled in. 

He was unsurprised to find that Crowley’d kept meticulous notes of all stages of the project. Viewed purely as a working, the thing was a masterpiece. All the effort was front-loaded to the early stages. Once built, it wouldn’t even need to be activated, but would run itself until the humans made a major design change, destroyed it, or stopped using it. He did, however, notice some interesting features of the ley/street configurations that Crowley seemed to have overlooked, which - while they would not exactly counter the Odegra working - could render the ring of evil more permeable to good influences than it otherwise would be. 

Encouraged by this, Aziraphale made himself another pot of tea, and sat down again to study the elements Crowley thought it best to implement through the computer. Without having met any of the humans involved, he was in no position not to assume that the conclusion was correct; but _were_ these elements in fact necessary to the final conception? Hmmm...yes, they did appear to be, if the working wasn’t to be in perpetual danger of minor alterations or damage rendering it either inert (which Aziraphale shouldn’t mind much) or actively harmful in terms of excess traffic accidents. Aziraphale used up half a legal pad and a roll of adding machine tape, demonstrating to himself that no reasonable alternatives could be trusted to keep the working stable.

How _did_ one tell a computer to make such changes, anyhow?

Aziraphale washed out the teapot and cup, closed up the shop, and took a trip around London’s more up-to-date and technologically-inclined libraries, in each of which he was able to find a charmingly helpful librarian who, in addition to leading him to the right books, answered a number of questions about how modern business machines functioned. (Aziraphale had never met a librarian who wasn’t charmingly helpful.) He returned home in the late afternoon with a stack of books on computer languages and a stencil of geometric figures which were apparently necessary for making documents called “flowcharts” in order to render the translation of desire into computer languages simpler. 

He had a prior engagement to dine with some young people who addressed him as “Auntie Fell” and whose mimeographed “comix” and “zines” formed the bulk of the literature that he actually sold these days, but once they had walked him home and hugged him good night and gone on their way to drink and dance and probably engage in sexual activity until the wee hours, he dug into his stacks and reviewed some documents and publications he’d rescued, at various times, from the Turing, Babbage, and Lovelace estates - not that computers hadn’t made great strides even since Alan’s day, but the peculiar mindset necessary to computer programming did not come naturally to Aziraphale, and touching base with his old friends allowed him to settle in with his library books to learn how to speak to machines with more confidence than he otherwise would have felt. 

Too bad the time limit didn’t mesh well with course-taking. He hadn’t done any formal schooling in centuries, as teacher or as pupil, and it might have been a pleasant occupation. Also, schools had computers. Since the only way to test a program was to run it, he wouldn’t know whether he’d learned the language properly till he had a computer to practice on. 

Oh, well, he’d figure it out.

\---

_Brrrnng, brrrnng!_

“A.Z. Fell and Company. How may I help you?”

“_What the heaven, angel?_”

“Oh, it’s arrived! Good. What do you think? Is it close enough?”

“If they don’t muck things up down the line, it’s perfect, but what were you _thinking?_”

Aziraphale sighed. “I was thinking you needed a win.”

“It’s _not_ \- I - _dgui_ \- This is a major working. A major _evil_ working. It could actually _harm_ your charges! _You’re the nice one!_ Are you out of your mind?”

Oh. Oh, dear. He’d disappointed Crowley. Aziraphale swallowed. “Possibly. By the way, I’m appalled at the idea of you using those workstations. I adjusted all of them before I left. Fewer cases of eyestrain in that department in the future.”

“That won’t make up - You shouldn’t have_ done_ this.”

“Well. I did. I also did some fiddling off my own hook, if that makes you feel better. Did you see the changes at the on-ramps?”

“Hang on.” Aziraphale listened to the rattle of large pages turning, and twisted the telephone cord as he waited, settling into his chair. Normally he took calls standing up, but he and Crowley could be on the line for awhile. The day was cold, but clear and fair, and the bookshop serenely free of all traffic, so he had nothing to distract him from knowing that Crowley was right, that he should not have done what he’d done. Humanity came before Crowley, it _had_ to. And yet - “Oh. Oh, yeah,_ that’s_ \- so the obstructions are counteracted for emergencies, makes sense, and for - what’s with the creative energy business? Can’t create while driving.”

“Well, I was thinking - people will be stuck in traffic a lot, correct? Sitting in the car, either not moving, or moving so slowly they might as well walk?”

“Moods trending sinward, yeah.”

“_Or_ \- drivers and passengers could utilize that time creatively. To work on problems and generate new ideas. Possibly both simultaneously, since the workings -“

“Oh, _I see,_ yeah, that’ll tie into the hindbrain there. Bad mood in front, creative thought in back. Clever. Not an offsetting virtue, though. Nobody could count this as _thwarting_ me.”

“No. No, they couldn’t. On the other hand, I I I have been reliably informed that _nobody needs to know.”_

_“Grkg.”_

“I got interested in the problem, all right? And I was worried about you.”

“Me? I’m _fine_. I _would be_ fine. You didn’t have to -“

“You are _not_ fine. You were strung so tight last time I saw you the breeze was playing tunes on your nerves. And you’ve been drinking alone, haven’t you?”

“Mm, some. Mostly in clubs, though, that’s not _alone.”_

“Mm-hmm. And how much have you had to drink today?”

“What are you, my mother?”

Aziraphale drank Earl Grey, the bergamot scent not even denting the tenseness of waiting in silence, and twisted the telephone cord tighter.

“Okay. Angel. I get it, I’m sorry, that was rude, you did something_ way_ out of your comfort zone for me and I ought to be grateful but _dammit_ \- The punishment, I’m _sure_, it wouldn’t have been _that_ bad. I’m _fine_. Just a little, wound up, is all.”

“I know, my dear. I’d invite you over, but I’m being audited.”

“Audited? What, like - a miracle audit?”

“Yes. I’m sure it’ll blow over in a few years.” The telephone cord was a kinked-up mess. Aziraphale began trying to untwist it.

“Years. Right. Sodding _Gabriel._”

“Uriel, actually. Not that it makes much difference. Meanwhile - you need a way to relax that doesn’t involve me, _or_ alcohol, _or_ driving at an excessive rate of speed.”

“I could take up glueing coins to the sidewalk again. But you reach a point of diminishing returns on that, relaxation-wise.”

“I understand knitting is very soothing.”

Crowley barked a laugh, as Aziraphale had intended he should. “I’ll leave that to you.”

“Stamp collecting? Painting? Gardening?”

“Ugh, _clutter_; colorblind; and I live in a penthouse flat. Where’m I going to put a garden?”

“You can grow plants indoors. Aspidistras and such.”

“_Mphm._ I’ll think about it.”

“You do that. Meanwhile - you haven’t said anything about the smaller package.”

“There was a smaller package?”

“There should be. I sent them at the same time. Manila envelope, typed labels, return address -“

“Oh, here it is! That’s Phillida and Julia’s place, isn’t it? Is there still a house there?”

“I’m afraid not. It’s a parking garage now.”

“Pity. Let’s see what we -“ _Rrrip_. “So, more plans - whoa, that’s a lot of little workings!”

“I don’t think I could make them any bigger and expect the Lord of the Files not to see them leeching off the M25. Should she come to look.”

“Mm. So. You’re thinking of setting up a, what, a mini-ecosystem here? A bunch of do-gooding workings trying to eat up and digest the evil?”

“If you like.” Untwisting the cord was much harder than twisting it had been. Aziraphale drank more tea.

Pages flipped on the other end. Crowley made thoughtful noises. “It won’t work. Traffic only _in_creases, it never _de_creases. I doubt these can handle even the initial load.”

“But they can alleviate it.”

“All together, yeah, maybe. It’d be a lot of work.”

A knot formed in his stomach to match the one in the phone cord. “It will, I know it will be more labor intensive than a few computer hacks, but I, I had hoped -“

“Yes, sorry, _of course_ I’ll take some of them! Yeah, don’t worry about it, I’ll take as many as you like. I just - headache coming on, out late last night, miss you to hell and back, and you’re not the only one worrying here, okay?”

“No need to worry about me, my dear! Head office won’t find a thing in that audit that isn’t supposed to be there.” Aziraphale sounded much too bright and cheery to himself. He could almost see Crowley shaking his head and frowning at the sound.

“I know they won’t, but - I’m not _talking_ about head office, I’m talking about _you_! The M25 isn’t like tempting a chieftain into cattle raiding! It doesn’t fall under the Arrangement. _You_ did that. For _me_.”

He had. Because Crowley had a thermos full of holy water and no impulse control or sense of self-preservation and bosses who could not be trusted and nobody, at all, in his corner except Aziraphale. “Not, not entirely. I got interested in the coding aspect. Learning new languages, all that. Wondered what, what Alan would think about it.”

“Turing wouldn’t want to be the ruin of you any more than I would.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Nobody’s _ruining_ me! The M25 is a masterpiece, _your_ masterpiece, and cramming it full of all those smaller workings will, will - anyway I can’t _un_hack the thing, so - onward and upward.”

“Or downward, as the case may be.”

“_Crowley!_ Please!”

“Sorry. I’ll take everything west of you, okay? Get started on ‘em right away. And I’ll look into taking up plants or something, I promise, no need to worry about me. Still a couple months till naptime but I’ll relax, be limp as a noodle next time I see you. You think it’s true, plants grow better if you talk to them?”

“Probably.” A sensation of distress approached. Aziraphale stood, to see through the side windows a dark young person in a blouse and side whiskers walking rapidly and looking over their shoulder. “You’ll have to excuse me, my dear, sanctuary time.”

“Sure thing, angel. You go get up to good. Ciao.”

_Click. Bzzzzzz. _

Aziraphale brushed crumbs off and straightened his bowtie as the shop bell rang and a pursuing gang of roughs hove into view. Duty called.

Even to bad angels like him.

Oh, he’d have to be so strict with himself to make up for this!

\--  
Crowley stared at the phone, then at the plans and printouts spread across his desk, elation warring with dismay over the sheer scale of the devotion they represented. “Aziraphale, you maddening clever idiot! You’ll have to be holier-than-thou for _decades_ to make up for this one! If - _argh_!” He swiveled in his throne to glare up at the ceiling, at the foot or so of acoustic tile, ductwork, steel beams, and concrete separating him from the heavens. “You _can’t_ evict him for this. You see that, right? He’s better than all the other angels combined and he _can’t_ \- you think _any_ other angel _any_where would take a risk like that, get his hands so dirty, for _any_body? Please - He’ll make up for it. A thousandfold. You _know_ he will, just - don’t cut him off. Please.”

No answer from the ceiling; of course not. She never answered questions. Why should She answer appeals?

Crowley picked up the large-scale maps traced over with plans for benevolent workings, and fanned through them, looking for the best place to start, and the best way to improve them, in order to stamp his angel’s loving care all over London’s face.

-30-


End file.
